Henry V review, Noel Coward Theatre

Jude Law is a very sexy man, even in doublet and hose or whatever it is that kings wore in 1413 when Henry V came to the throne of England. What set Henry apart was his youth - a largely feckless youth up to the point of his father's death - and his extraordinary victory over the French at Agincourt where, despite being vastly outnumbered, the English use of the longbow reduced the ratio of dead to one Englishman for every nine French,  You will get little sense of this from Law's Henry V which, under Michael Grandage's stark direction, is a Pitman's shorthand version of Shakespeare's favourite history play. They're in such a hurry to rattle through, we don't even get a set change, so everything happens in front of a backdrop of silver and brown wooden planks that look like seventies hessian wallpaper.

Henry V was only 35 when he died, but this Henry is middle-aged and weary from the off, his lips and eyes drawn downwards. That said, he does look splendid in tight pants. Anyone who saw Law in Hamlet or Anna Christie, knows he's a great stage actor, and he does his best with this schizophrenic characterisation - moving nimbly from sombre monarch to rom-com hero. The slapstick ending where he slips into Estuary English, capering around wooing a Princess at whom he had not looked until that moment, and who appeared this evening to be anxious about his breath or something on his face, is unexpected. Because there's been no build up. What the sudden-onset coy-boyishness delivers, is the theatrical money shot for lady fans with moist gussets.

This is tabloid Shakespeare without the wit or finesse.  Grandage did the same thing last year with A Midsummer Night's Dream, paring the script to the bone and getting his cast to belt through it, brazenly sacrificing richness of language,  finer plot detail, and narrative tension. For this you pay £118 a ticket. Twice that amount through an agency. Little wonder the girl behind us got out a tupperware filled with prawn salad in the interval. There are, of course, some lovely performances but it's a minimal cast literally treading boards. The presentation is unimaginative in every particular, and every scene a downstage conversation. It was, said my knowledgeable companion, like a rehearsed reading being blocked out for the stagehands.

In conclusion: This production is taking the mick - indeed, there were times it felt the excellent cast were parodying themselves for a laugh. If you are a Law fan with substantial disposable income, you can still get the odd ticket on internet sites demanding huge premiums, but that's the only reason to shell out.